Today we’ve had the pleasure of talking to one of our first Pandora FMS Ambassadors. After having talked to him some days ago in order to introduce our program to him, the feeling I had was that he was a person with a large amount of technical knowledge and with a very clear view of how the technological world is orienting itself. Personally I was mentally blitzed, I only could keep listening to all the new things he had to tell me. For this reason, in this meeting Toni, Sancho and myself were present. The conversation was quite interesting, and we learned quite a few things we expect to share with all of you, our readers. Thanks for giving us your time Toni.
Toni works in the DevOps area for Alfresco, as a security architect and we wanted to learn a lot from him on our second time talking together. To make it easier for us to accomplish this, Toni talked about different thematic units. As a starting point he told us about his experiences with cloud-based systems, specifically with Amazon. Next we discussed his peculiar vision on the future of software development and its integrations. As a finisher, we mentioned how he sees monitoring tools in this new technological scene.
Experiences in cloud-based systems (such as Amazon) and their monitoring
It¡s really interesting to hear Toni talk about his experience in cloud-based systems. Clearly, and as we can see throughout the interview, in his opinion this is the future. Amongst the most important solutions he mentions for what is now known as Infrastructure as a Service Toni states that Amazon, Azure, and Google Compute Engine are the ones who are making more racket. Toni tells us that these are rather the most widespread and used IaaS solutions, which is totally aligned with the demand we face in Spain, although it is possible for Azure to be more dominant than in the USA.
“Large companies are moving over to Amazon” -says Toni- “Clearly this is the future. Going over to cloud services is just realizing exactly how much money you can save.”, he resumes. Toni is advocating for creating cloud services that can actually result competitive. At Ártica we agree upon the fact that cloud computing is the future and that both large and small companies are moving that way. There’ll always be legacy systems and infrastructures, along with DataBases that can’t be on third party servers, but clearly we agree on the fact that now, the liveliest element is the cloud.
He told us about Alfresco (his company) having planned to use Panfora FMS to monitor their systems. A shame we hadn’t met before. In the end they felt more inclined towards Datadog, due to its focus on cloud monitoring. At this point, we reach positive feedback, because Pandora FMS isn’t only focused on cloud computing, we have plugins available to monitor a cloud service, but this monitoring is included under our in-house deployed systems and processes for monitoring. This is when we learned that maybe we’re a bit too ambitious and that we should offer our SaaS services independently, for those who solely watch for cloud-related monitoring software.
He mentions that Datadog grants him only low-level coverage. He doesn’t see it as a competitor to New Relic, Appdynamics or Pandora FMS, since its focused on low-level subjects and themes. It also cannot cover security needs correctly.
Toni carries on telling us about his cloud computing experiences, clearly he is passionate about his job and enjoys every minute of it. “Using CloudFormation Templates we’ve crated a 4 node, 4 security layer, hardening cluster for Alfresco, in just one hour. Composed of 8 servers that can handle up to 3,000 concurrent users. We know of people that make a 3 month budget for the same task.” he assures us.
Also, Toni shares with us his experience taking Alfresco to the cloud. They’ve noticeably reduced costs and development timeframes. This makes us re-think what a winning bet must be for all those that want to transfer their solutions onto a cloud-based system. Offering user customization on cloud systems could be a very important and market-competitive key element.
The light shone by Toni on the Plug and Play philosophy used, for example, by Amazon, is quite interesting. The recent possibility to create applications and to upload them as AMI files onto Amazon servers, in order to ease tool installation and deployment of said application “helps installation and prevents headaches”.
Conclusions
Summing up, there exists a clear migration of a lot of companies over to cloud-based systems, and there’s a large battle being waged to prove who’s the best service provider on that cloud. We can see that niche monitoring tools focused on cloud monitoring exist, but to the day they don’t offer global coverage like Pandora FMS can. This means that users will be able to monitor systems, applications and processes. Clearly we cannot undermine cloud application monitoring, and that it should be something to focus on if you’re looking toward the near future.
Finally, Toni tells us how he’s created a ‘White Paper’ to integrate security layers on Alfresco deployments, in order to comply with US legal norms. Furthermore we congratulate him because Amazon has actually promoted this White Paper as a high-quality document.
In the following entry, we’ll discuss Toni’s vision on DevOps and where the development world is heading, along with continuous integration. We’ll talk about ChatOps and many more interesting facts and thoughts.
What do you think about Toni’s perspective? If you should have any commentary or personal experience that contributes to our information on tools to use and how to use them when it comes to cloud monitoring, feel free to let us know!
Pandora FMS’s editorial team is made up of a group of writers and IT professionals with one thing in common: their passion for computer system monitoring. Pandora FMS’s editorial team is made up of a group of writers and IT professionals with one thing in common: their passion for computer system monitoring.
